There’s a host of high quality, independent restaurants in Horsham and my family uses them a fair bit. But it’s fair to say branded food and beverage claim the majority of our household out-of-home spend. So I thought I’d make list of where we spent the most money in 2013 and why. The following list doesn’t include branded offers that we would certainly frequent if they traded in Horsham. YO! Sushi, for example, is our 14-year-old’s favourite branded restaurant but we have to travel to Guildford to find one. So, here’s where the most cash was spent in 2013 in descending order.

1) Costa Coffee claims top spot by dint of its ubiquity. The daily routine starts with a Costa Coffee purchased when picking up the newspapers. There are four Costa Coffee machines dotted at service stations close to Horsham and a shop in the centre of town. Often, I’ll pop out and buy the office a Costa as a treat. Most days involve buying at least two and sometimes three. Such is the need for a morning caffeine fix that I’ll drive between Shell stations looking for a machine that’s actually working.

2) There’s a Premium County Dining Group site at Handcross near Crawley, The Red Lion. It was converted from a Chef & Brewer when Paul Salisbury and Paul Hales were still in favour at Mitchells & Butlers. It started well, nose-dived and has come storming back in the last year or so, as a young and talented manager, Neil Robertson, has taken it by the scruff of the neck. The menu is little short of wonderful, with lot of great choices and great fixed price options. It’s a first choice for post-work and weekend comfort eating. PCDG contains the wow flavours that set Browns apart in its heyday. It’s a 20-minute drive from Horsham, which is testament to how good this site is.

3) Wagamama: How do they serve food with such speed and consistency? No nonsense, super-friendly service. Tasty choices galore. When you’re in the mood for slurpy noodles nothing else will do. And then, this autumn, they brought back our all-time favourite, kare lomen, whose absence I never quite got to the bottom of despite badgering the ever-patient Ingrid in Wagamama’s marketing department. I think we went to Wagamama three times in four nights to satisfy the kare lomen cravings. Sometimes they ‘comp’ our meal because we’re regulars and they’re very nice people.

4) Cote: Metronomic service, great value, utterly consistent. Breakfast is hard to beat for complete reliability and we go most weekends. Nerdishly, we travelled to the Reigate branch on opening weekend for breakfast – and it was just as good as Horsham. We take friends to Cote on special occasions, too.

5) Bill’s: Some of the magic has been smoothed away since its evolution from the Lewes template, but the menu’s still outstanding, with lots of things you actually want to eat. And it’s still charmingly eccentric. Invariably, something goes wrong during service at Bill’s in Horsham. And service is far from quick. But the staff are lovely and quick to acknowledge the screw-ups. We keep going back because they are so darn nice – and they’ll get there eventually.

6) PizzaExpress: The venerable pizza brand is still the family first choice for pizza and pasta, especially now there’s a calzone option. It’s just so reliable and feels like pretty good value-for-money. We like Prezzo too, but not quite as much. We don’t ‘get’ Strada and we’ve tried Ask Italian a few times in the past year and been disappointed – everything felt a little pinched and mean, portion-wise.

7) Toby Carvery: When you’re in the mood for a roast dinner, Toby is hard to beat. It’s worth enduring the long, snaking queue at the carvery, the unsmiling service from the put-upon carver and the shambolic atmosphere induced by the sheer number of customers piling in at peak times on a Sunday. It’s a slam-dunk people-pleaser and there’s been a blizzard of coupons this year to provide even sharper value at the Langley Green branch in Crawley. Makes you wonder why Mitchells & Butlers isn’t adding them much faster.

8) Harvester: We have two options – Crawley and Haywards Heath and they both got used a fair bit in 2013. Again, tremendous value and the salad cart knocks spots off the equivalent at Pizza Hut, whose new generation site in Crawley Leisure Park is disappointing. Harvester lays claim to the only mainstream restaurant brand whose takeaway option we actually use once-in-a-while. That food critic Tom Parker Bowles didn’t like Harvester was as predictable as Will Self feeling nauseous in a JD Wetherspoon.

2014 sees a Giggling squid and Nando’s opening in Horsham. How much our leisure spend will they capture? I’ll let you know in a year or so…